Quick News from Around the Net

Swurl

I’m playing with a site called swurl. Signing up is free, so I made my own site. So far, it smacks a lot like Tumblr, but it seems to handle aggregation of high-volume sites better, but the tradeoff is that there is little in the way of customization of the theme. You can specify a logo image, logo text, background image.. and that’s about it. But the theme does allow the content you re-syndicate to speak for itself, and has a very clever commenting system built-in.

Also, it doesn’t have a way to enter in new articles directly. It is more of a new, unique take on a content aggregator/lifestream app than Tumblr.

Feedly

Louis Gray broke the news on a great little Firefox plug-in that dives in to your Google Reader feeds, your FriendFeed, del.icio.us, and Twitter networks, and your Yahoo! and Gmail email networks (and more) to pull together a magazine-style presentation. It’s called Feedly. As far as I can tell, it runs entirely within the browser frame (completely client side, except the data sources) and is really slick and fast. Definitely worth a view.

Disqus Trackback Support

Disqus announced support for trackbacks on the back-end and javascript plug-in today! This is great news, as up until now, us Disqus users had to be satisfied with a hack that was whipped up by Scott Jangro.

Enabling the support is as easy as clicking a button in the Disqus site configuration. As far as I can tell, it does not support rolling in old trackbacks, it just provides an XML-RPC interface that is used from the point it is enabled forward. Which means, until the new version of the Disqus API plugin rolls out, the Jangro hack is still useful.

Duncan Riley also wrote about the new trackback support. Mostly, I wanted to see the trackback link show up on his site.

Louis Gray goes Breaking News Crazy

We had a bit of warning about this on Sunday on FriendFeed. It’s been breaking news story after breaking news story on Louis Gray’s site.

Ohh yeah.. one other bit of news..

Firefox 3 Release Candidate Download Day!

That’s right! Go get it! This has been the big news today, and it is being downloaded worldwide at a furious pace. You can find it a working download link here.

PS – Yes, I am messing with an article style. If it annoys you, please read my about page…

posted June 17th, 2008 in Related | Tags: aggregation, disqus, feedly, firefox, jangro, lifestream, Louis Gray, swurl, tumblr, xml rpc

Keith

Agreed. Fortunately I didn't see the friends added but it added a "Technology" category and a "Thinkers" category with 20 or so "recommended" feeds that were not my type of feeds. I wouldn't be so miffed if it had asked my permission first but I don't like it assuming it knows what I like.

I'll not abandon Reader yet. Feedly is a bit sluggish and I can consume feed much more quickly via Reader. It would probably be great for someone who subscribes to 20 or 30 blogs but when you subscribe to 169 blogs I need to be able to sort and read quickly.

I'll keep trying it but I've never been a big "homepage" guy....

Keith

Feedly is ok. It added some tag categories to my Google Reader and I don't appreciate that at all. The homepage itself takes some getting used to especially if you subscribe to many feeds. It's a nifty idea though.

Phil Glockner

I had the same problem! I thought I had messed something up. When I went to the friends pane, it added a TON of people, along with hundreds of subscriptions, one for each person. Annoying if you switch back to using greader.

tw3nty3ight

I tried Feedly, It had promise. However it added feeds to my Google Reader without my knowledge. FAIL

Phil Glockner

Agreed. In fact, I think that will be the topic of my next blog post.